On the streets of life - between ideologies and reality E-Book

Jürgen Weber

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 338

Beschreibung

"Nothing is more constant than change," said the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. And this is exactly what Jürgen Weber shows us in his new book "On the Roads of Life". He begins by describing how mankind and the climate have developed over millions of years. One thing becomes clear: there have always been changes, but climate change is dramatic and is provoked by humans. We must therefore try to minimize it - but also learn to live with it. Weber also explains how ideologies change society and that we need more direct democracy. Especially in such turbulent times and in times of upheaval, we need to involve citizens more, otherwise there is a risk that they will turn away from the system completely.

Leseprobe

On the streets of life - between ideologies and reality

A very personal humanistic-ethical view from the perspective of a doctor

The evolution of man under ideological and economic conditions

1 Cover picture: Migration of mankind

"... I have now (finally) finished your new book, a really interesting brief outline of world history with a focus on more recent times, garnished with philosophical and social analyses and spiced up with a pleasant, easy-to-read style.

Books of this kind are sometimes interesting, but very often far too lengthy and not very entertaining to read. You have managed the balancing act between the facts and the interesting presentation well ..." (HF)

Introduction - Prologue

When I wrote my autobiography, I had no idea that my personal confrontation with the past and especially with my life in the GDR and then in the FRG would move me so much that I would one day deal so intensively with the question of personal dependence under the ideological rule of a political system. In particular, I was repeatedly moved by the question of whether the sole activity in a political system and the assumption of responsibility within it could be punishable, unless it could be proven that acts were committed that were incompatible with the general principles of the United Nations Charter of Human Rights and the moral and ethical rules of conduct that governed me. On the other hand, I was increasingly interested in the question of what influence the ideology of a society exerts on us personally and how we ourselves develop and change in our thoughts and actions under an overriding ideology.

As a doctor, I practiced my profession a surgeon with great passion, spent over 50 years in the operating theatre on my own responsibility, was allowed to manage a large thoracic clinic, stood in a university lecture hall teaching students and always walked through the world of medicine with my eyes wide open. I have always endeavored to take my own scientific position on many critical issues. Many scientific publications - over 40 - including a book contribution in Schmidt/Kiene "Chirurgie der Infektionen" J. A. Barth-Verlag 1991, 3rd revised edition, and a large number of lectures - over 100 - at national and international conferences have not only enriched my professional knowledge, but also the unspeakable number of personal human contacts and conversations have shaped my life.

I was never politically active. I only ever saw my medicine and my sick patients. Even in the social change that was necessary for me after reunification as an independent, purely private surgeon in the field of aesthetic surgery, I remained true to the principles of humanity and social justice. Even before the necessary self-employment, I went through the status of an unemployed person with an unemployment benefit freeze for three months because I was dismissed as a so-called state director by the ministry in Saxony.

In my profession, I have always seen the patient and not the money he or she might bring me. And even under these new social conditions and the completely new ideologies for me in a capitalist market economy with a so-called parliamentary democracy, I have remained true to my principles as a doctor, even if such a code has not helped me economically at all. I never had the desire for more and more.

In my medical career, I have conducted at least 75,000 initial consultations with patients since 1977 alone. The number of major thoracic operations is probably around 5,000 and in aesthetic surgery there are also at least 5,000 surgical procedures with around 15,000 initial consultations.

I was not only expected to have theoretical and technical as I surgical skills, but also very profound psychological assessments, which were particularly important in lung cancer surgery and later in aesthetic surgery, as I usually had to decide on medically unnecessary procedures in aesthetic surgery.

Important to understand my concern: I have always had to clear and unambiguous decisions. I'm sure many professionals feel the same way.

My view of the world has changed over the last 30 years based on the basis of these life experiences as a doctor. The belief in the good in people has faltered and the lack of character in politics with its incredible global distortions determines my current assessment of human behavior under ideological and economic constraints. And then there is this unimaginable addiction to power, which we can currently observe again in politics.

With this reflection, I personally visualize the laws of political and economic power and dependent powerlessness as well as the laws of capitalism in society that are still insurmountable today: the power of capital! I want to find answers for myself to the current questions of life that I cannot get from politics.

With these premises in mind, I would like to start a journey through the ages of life and their ideologies and try to present the special framework conditions of life and the environment as they affect us humans from my point of view and my experience. My scientific orientation should help me in this endeavor.

This is a very personal reflection and analysis based on research and personal experience. My personal experience with politics is one of disappointment and frustration. Therefore, with this book I want to find a truth for myself by confronting facts that should be determinative for a life in a supposedly social and just society. I have deliberately concentrated my research on the Internet. This should make it possible for any interested reader to find further details on the respective topic very easily.

My thoughts are those of a completely normal but critical citizen.

This is not a book you can just read, it requires time, concentration and interest in theparticular subject matter because of the wealth of data.

Fig. 2: Baltic Sea newspaper from 30. 09. 2022

Everything is in flux,is the most important and necessary basic insight for understandingour lives. And according to Hegel: "The so-called world history is the history of the unequal relationship between people"or"History is the history of the relationship between people and their conflicts"(1).

So let's start with theformation of our planetand the unstoppablemigration of the continental platesand their influence on the development of human life.

Formation of our planet - the Big Bang

The coming and going as the primal law of life; the migration of the continental plates; Laurasia; Pangaea and Gondwana; Alfred Wegener; Alexander Humboldt; supercontinent Pangaea and supercontinent Amasia-Aurico scenario; the continental shifts in the coming millions of years; the continents come and go just like our society; the technosphere; the eras of human history

According to the science of cosmology everything began with the"Big Bang".

According to current knowledge that was 13.8 billion years ago. Matter, space and time developed with the Big Bang, or rather in the time of the Big Bang. The Big Bang is not an explosion in the modern sense, but rather refers to a period of up to 400,000 years after the primordial event(2).

4.5-4.6 billion years ago, our present-day Earth was a hot glowing ball that slowly cooled down and then acquired a crust 4 billion years ago. Water in the oceans was the prerequisite for the emergence of the simplest living organisms, initially in the form of low bacterial populations (e.g. cyanobacteria). It was the time of theArchean.The primitive life forms began to produce oxygen 2.5 billion years ago and more complex cells with cell nuclei and finally multicellular organisms were able to form. A rapid development took place 550 million years ago, when a great diversity of species developed.

It is not my aim here to formulate a complex account of the history of the earth, but we should recognize the importance of constant change in all areas of space and time and in our own lives, both in the history of the earth and in human development. We ourselves are only part of this absolutely complex existence on this planet. And we should take note of the fact that developments never proceed evenly, but are also interrupted, just as the dinosaurs, for example, were subject to sudden extinction. They dominated life for 200 million years, then came a meteorite whose cloud of ash and dust darkened the earth with the result that the climate changed over a long period of time with the result that not only the dinosaurs died out. However, where there is extinction, new life is also encouraged. Other - previously suppressed forms of life - are given the chance to develop to a higher level, in which humans could also emerge.

First, however, we must deal with the actual material history of the earth, because only by understanding it can we gain an understanding of the fundamentals of life:coming and going are the basic laws of life in all areas. Our climate is also subject to such constant change and the landscapes also change with the climate. We simply need to accknowledge that Thuringia, for example, was a large inland lake 300 million years ago because the continents were still separated at that time. It was only thanks to such changes in nature that researchers were able to find fossils on the outskirts of Oberhof in 2012 (3)

There were also times of lush greenery in the Sahara Desert in Africa, where hippos and elephants lived and crocodiles lived in the many lakes. The climate in northernAfrica depends very much on the monsoons, which in turn are controlled by cyclical changes in the Earth's orbit. They change approximately every 20,000 years. Around 8,500 BC, the Sahara was populated because people followed the green pastures and hunting grounds that had developed due to the climate. For 3,000 years, this land has been a desert again, as we know it today. And the "transformation" is certainly not complete, the desert will one day adapt to the current climatic conditions. But it is beyond our human conception of space and time and we are not able to visualize such a complex process for ourselves. Perhaps we don't want to admit it? Perhaps humans are building up a protective shield when it comes to the future according to the basic idea: I live today, what do I care about tomorrow? The representatives of the "Last Generation" climate activists may well have thoughts that reach into the future, but they have not understood the objective problem of change, otherwise they would not start these morbid strike actions and stick themselves to roads and thus obstruct ambulances or soil precious pictures in galleries (30. 10- 01. 11. 22 and again in February 2023 on the highways and other roads). This is certainly no way to campaign for necessary measures to combat climate change, which we are fundamentally unable to prevent anyway. Is it so difficult to understand that it is not we who control nature, but nature who controls us?We only have to look at the history of the earth and if we finally understood this global process of constant change, the thoughts in the heads of politicians would also become clearer.

To put it from my point of view: We must certainly try to influence climate change, but above all we must accept that we must also adapt to it! When I listen to our so-called political elite, I always get the impression that politics is only about abstractly opposing global warming through new so-called "green energies", but not about the necessary understanding of this process. New technologies for so-called "clean" energy generation are being developed and enforced almost by force. Is this deliberate because it promotes or subsidizes new technologies for a future global market? Or have our politicians not wanted to acknowledge the process of climate change, which has been repeatedly emphasized by scientists for years, and have they not even understood it? Was it perhaps the pro-industry tendencies within the political parties that prevented us from looking to the future? Aren't the Gulf States an example of how to deal with geothermal energy? Yes, it costs a lot of money, but there are solutions for living with geothermal energy and not all people have to migrate to Mars. Should we perhaps rethink things a little and not slip back into a one-way street of thought? Life is multi-layered!!! Only politics is very one-sided.

But let's first go back to the past, to the Sahara Desert over 3,000 years ago with its lush vegetation and many animals.

There is another geological process that also has a very lasting effect on humans, namely the migration of the continents and the ice ages.

So let's take a look at the global changes caused by themigration of the continents with plate tectonics.

Fig.3: Migration of the continents

Fig.. 4: Westermann, Earth – The Migration of the Continents since theMesozoic era 135 million years ago. Development of the Continents and life

The earth's crust is a comparatively very thin layer made up of several layers of rock. Only 30 centimetres of the 11,000-kilometre-deep earth's crust is fertile soil. And it takes several hundred years for new layers of humus to form. 250 million years ago there was a primeval continent(Pangaea)and a primeval ocean. This gave rise to two continents until the pre-Cretaceous period, which in turn disintegrated. "Laurasia, the northern landmass of the supercontinentPangaea, includedNorth America with Greenland and most of Eurasia.Gondwanawas the southern part of the supercontinent and consisted of South America and Africa; India and a landmass of Antarctica and Australia had already split off"(4).

"60 millionyears ago, shortly after the end of the dinosaur age, the primordial Tethys Sea was almost closed, India had shifted further towards Asia. The Atlantic Ocean had formed between South America and Africa, and in the southern hemisphere the separation of Australia from Antarctica was becoming apparent. North America and Eurasia, on the other hand, were still connected by the Greenland land bridge"(4).

The collision of the Indian shield with Asia led to the formation of the Himalayas, Australia began to develop its own flora and fauna over millions of years and the Arctic Ocean was formed between Norway and Greenland.Alfred Wegener- meteorologist and polar researcher - developed this theory of plate architectonics 100 years ago, see Fig. 5 below.

Fig. 5: Alfred Wegener

In 1912, it wasAlexander von Humboldtwho noticed that the bulge of the eastern coastal area of South America fits into the Bay of Africa, and he theorized that the countries bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once connected. He published his work "The Origin of Continents and Oceans" in 1915 and cited the fossil plants and animals found on both sides of the Atlantic as proof. A convincing argument.

This migration - drift - continues to this day and, as a result, there are volcanoes on the faults with varying degrees of activity right up to modern times. TheSan Andreas FaultinCalifornia and theNorth Anatolian Faultin Turkey are impressive examples of this.

Fig. 6: Alfred Wegener's theory about theunique situation of America

on the African Continental Plateau

And what will happen next? 200 million years ago all the continents were united in thesupercontinent Pangaeaand in another 200 million years the continents will be united again to form a new supercontinent(5).

Where will the supercontinent be located? There are two theories on this:

On the one hand: Thesupercontinent Amasiawill be in the north in 200 million years: Then it would get cold with more snowfall and new ice sheets. The North Atlantic would disappear and the ocean currents would change. Secondly: The opposite is truefor the Aurico scenario:the supercontinent land mass would then be located at the equator, absorb a lot of sunlight and, as a result, global warming would increase by an average of 3 degrees(6).

We have therefore by no meansarrived at our destination in terms of the earth's development and should understand that we have to think and act in different time frames and must not use our short lifetimes as a yardstick for fundamental global decisions about life on this planet.It would be a great task for politicians not to scare people about global warming, but rather to help them understand such processes without triggering worries about survival(see climate activists of the Greens with chaos developments, currently the "Last Generation", which has since been banned by the police authorities in Bavaria on 24.05.23 for "forming a criminal organization" and is thus classified as a criminal group in my view (6b).

Plate tectonics is divided into seven so-called lithospheric plates, which are also known as continental plates (lithospheric plates are the scientific term for the movement of the Earth's plates).(7).

The earth's crust (lithosphere) is between 35 and 70 kilometers thick.

Theseven lithospheric plates are:

the North American Plate

and the

Eurasian Plate,

the

South American Plate

and the

African Plate,

the

Antarctic Plate

and the

Australian Plate

and thePacific Plate,the only one of the large plates without a significant proportion of continental crust. The Pacific Plate consists almost entirely of seabed, the other plates of landmass and seabed.

Fig. 7: The principle of plate tectonics

And what is the current situation in Europe aus? Europe is submerging as the African seabed sinks below the Earth's mantle. Where African seabed was previously lost, the European crust now has to submerge into the Earth's mantle. Independently of this, Africa is moving northwards towards Europe, pushing Sicily northwards(8).As a very recent consequence (February 5, 2023), we had to witness the devastating earthquakein Turkey and northern Syria in the media.So continents come and go and what is today will be completely different millions of years from now.These are the scientific realities that, among other things, will have a decisive impact on our life paths and on ourselves. The fact that the social and political conditions surrounding us and also the economic conditions will change by then and exert a huge influence on us is something I would like to discuss in more detail elsewhere, but I would like to make the point now:Our society will also be different in a thousand years' time! Perhaps even much sooner.

In doing so, we should realize the constant change in our living environment and understand that our own thoughts and actions will also change with these natural changes and that the roads of life on which we move are constantly reformatting and that we are also controlled (manipulated) in our thoughts and actions by party ideologies. But more on that later.

The organic world - thetechnosphere -is constantly changing due to human activity, just as the seasons repeat themselves but are never the same. Today, the technosphere is 8 times heavier than the Earth's biomass! And we can only farm on 1/8th of the Earth's surface! We will see elsewhere that political ideologies are constantly changing under such premises and "touch" us in a special way.

Many millions of years ago, humans entered this world of constant comings and goings simply by adapting. If we immerse ourselves in this process, we will understand not only the processes of becoming human, but also the ideological influences of today's political sphere on each individual.

Human history is generally divided into five major eras (9):

Age of prehistory (oldest history of mankind without written records)

Ancient age (from the 4th millennium)

Middle Ages (beginning after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476)

Modernity (after the fall of the Byzantine Empire)

Contemporary history (beginning of the 2nd half of the 18th century)

From Neanderthals and Homo sapiens to modern man (10)

Mutations and adaptation; the molecular clock; Homo erectus; Homo sapiens and Neanderthals; the VOXP2 gene.

The developmentof humans is characterized bymutationsandadaptation. This is documented by countless fossil finds in Africa, Asia and Europe. With the help of DNA analyses, it has been established that every human being carries around 50 base changes in their genome -mutations. These mutations originated in the germline of the parents and are not part of the actual primary genome. Using a molecular clock, it was calculated that the mutation rate is around 50 changes per generation per genome and that this takes around 25 years per generation. If this time frame is applied, such a molecular clock can be used to calculate when two populations have separated. With these facts, it is possible to describe the evolutionary history of humans today.

It begins with the splitting of the last ancestral populations of chimpanzees and humans. The subpopulations from which humans emerged are referred to asHominini. For the sakeof completeness, it should be mentioned that the Hominini species are also referred to asAustralopithecines(pre-humans),Homo habilisandHomo rudolfensis,as prehistoric humans.

"Themolecular clockis ametaphor for a method of genetics that uses DNA sequencing to estimate the time at which two species split from a common ancestor. The more mutations (differences in the DNA sequence) that occurred after the split, the longer the development time (evolutionary time) since that point in time. It is difficult to determine the mutation rate (the frequency of mutations) and thus to calibrate the 'speed' of the molecular clock.

The molecular clock technique is an important tool of molecular genetics for dating evolutionary events and classifying living organisms" (11).

The recalculation of genome sequencing carried out since 2010 revealed that gorillas separated from chimpanzees 6-10 million years ago through mutations. Such calculations by different scientists sometimes result in different time periods, but this is not essential for our own consideration. One thing is certain: the cradle of humanity was in the earlyMiocenein East Africa around 7 million years ago, when humans separated from the great apes as hominins (Jose' Braga, palaeoanthropologist "The cradle of humanity dried up" (11b). In 2010, it was discovered that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens have the same genome, but that Neanderthals have much less genetic diversity. Inbreeding and cannibalism are discussed as the cause of this. The lower genetic diversity is a flaw because it makes the individual more susceptible to genetic diseases. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, was genetically better equipped and therefore far ahead of Neanderthals in terms of the chance of survival in genetic development. In(12)the interested reader will find very detailed data on the many named mutations in the development of humans.

I would like to makea leap here by looking at the changing and, above all, external influences in human history.

Eight to six million years ago, Africa was covered by a tropical rainforest. Water temperatures in the oceans were 10 degrees higher than today(13).

Homo erectuslived here and spread from Africa to Europe. This is said to have been the case 600,000 years ago. Homoerectus already fed on animals and went hunting: elephants, rhinoceroses, bears, sabre-toothed tigers and wild horses. To do this, it used spears, which required a certain amount of intelligence to make. In 1994, such spears were found in Schöningen and estimated to be around 300,000 years old. The successor to Homo erectus was Homo Heidelbergensis. He hunted in communities. The successor to Homo Heidelbergensis was the Neanderthal. Homo erectus already had fire and from him theNeanderthalevolved in Europe, less than 2 percent of whose genes can still be found in

modern humans.

Fig. 8 and Fig. 9:

Neanderthals

Neanderthals hunted in small groups and spread across Europe and beyond, as far as Siberia and what is now Iraq. Neanderthals are not our direct ancestors, but they are related to us. Neanderthals lived in Europe for 300 thousand years.

Homo erectusin Africa developed intoHomo sapiens, the direct ancestor of our present-day human race. They also migrated to Europe and repeatedly encountered the Neanderthals here. They were hunter-gatherers who roamed the land in small groups as nomads. As a result, they had no claim to ownership of a specific territory. They lived in warm and cold periods of the earth's history. However, the Neanderthals died out 39,000 years ago, whether due to disease or a massive volcanic eruption is disputed by experts. A viral infection from the brain of a victim in the wake of the prevailing cannibalism cannot be ruled out. However, there were already considerable climatic fluctuations at that time, which made survival more difficult. For example, 39,000 years ago, icebergs migrated as far as Europe and the climate cooled. These changes are also referred to as Heinrich Event 4 (ZDFneo, 07. 11. 22). It is less likely that there were fights between the two human species. Perhaps Homo sapiens also brought other diseases from Africa that were fatal to Neanderthals. After all, as we know today, it was European conquerors who introduced infectious diseases (e.g. measles) to the Native American tribes and thus led to a minimization of the tribes. However, it is also possible that the genetic conditions of Neanderthals with a weak immune system, in contrast to Homo sapiens with a strong immune system, were the reason for the high death rate caused by disease. Some scientists dispute this due to the Neanderthals' way of life in small groups and say that it was only when humans became sedentary with direct and indirect contact and infection possibilities that diseases could spread as infectious diseases. Nevertheless, Neanderthals developed a good immune response to many diseases over thousands of years, which is still active in our DNA today and protects us against RNA stem viruses in particular.

Studies have shown that Neanderthals were already making tools and had already developed social behavior towards family members - they cultivated a burial culture and had created the smallest functional structures through the division of labor. And they were already familiar with medicinal plants such as yarrow and chamomile. It is also assumed that Neanderthals had already developed their first primitive language, as the gene responsible for language has been found:VOXP2 gene.And it is now assumed that the complex production of tools, for example, would theoretically not have been possible without such communication.

Neanderthals and Homo sapiens created common descendants. This is the result of genetic analyses. In 2010, the Neanderthal genome was decoded and sequenced at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. It was found that 98.5% of Neanderthal DNA is identical to our DNA today. Outside of Africa, everyone has around 2 % of the Neanderthal genes in them and 20 % of the Neanderthal genes still exist in us.

However, the Neanderthal genome was not very diverse.

Even today, such genetic mixing is taking place as people reproduce with each otherthrough globalization, creating new genetic diversity.

Fig. 10: "Spread of anatomically modern humans (red) about the earth and previous colonization by Homo erectus (yellow) and Neanderthals (ochre); the numbers arefor years before today" (10).

Spread and characteristics of humans since the Stone Age (14)

The spread of man.

Year

Event B.C.

-2.600.000

Beginning of the Paleolithic Age (Early Stone Age), first representatives of the genus Homo

-1.000.000

oldestfireplaces, which were undoubtedly used by humans (Homo erectus)

-300.000

Transition from hominization to modern humans, emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa

-160.000

Start of the first wave of settlements

-110.000

Arrival of the people in the Middle East

-60.000

Arrival of the people in Australia

-45 000

Beginning of the colonization of Europe

-40.000

Start of the colonization of Asia in a second wave of settlement

-18.000

First traces of the Neolithic Revolution

-17.000

Oldest traces of pottery in Xianrendong and Diaotonghuan (China)

-15.000

Start of the colonization of America

-14.000

Evidence of the domestication of dogs in the double grave at Oberkassel

-13 000

Ceramic vessels from the Jomon culture in Japan

-12.000

Natufian culture in the Levant

-11.000

Start of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent

-10.500

Gradual emergence of the first advanced civilizations in Mesopotamia

-9.500

Beginning of the Clovis culture in North America

-8.800

Beginning of the Folsom culture in North America

-8.500

Beginning of the domestication of pigs (see: History of pig farming)

-8.000

The oldest traces of cereal cultivation in the Middle East

-7.400

Foundation of Çatalhöyük in Anatolia (see: History of Anatolia)

-7.000

Beginning of agriculture in the Archaic period in Central and South America

-7.000

Domesticated rice in China

-7.000

Proven domestication of the pig in Anatolia

-5.500

oldest evidence of writing that can be distinguished from ornamentation (history)

-4.000

Classical civilizations, beginning of antiquity

-2.200

Beginning of the Bronze Age in Mesopotamia (prehistory)

-1.700

Beginning of the Iron Age in Asia Minor (History of Anatolia)

-1.500

Second wave of colonization of Oceania

Original data from the above source

The ice ages (15)

The Palaeoproterozoic; ice ages and warm periods; changes every 10,000 years; the Milankovitch theory; the significance of solar activity for the climate

Our earth is 4.6 billion years old. If you convert this period to 24 hours, man only appears in the last 3 seconds. In this short period of geological history, he has managed to expose life on this earth to destruction. Man believes he is intelligent, but he has still not understood the global process of coming and going.

Six ice ages are known in the science of Earth's history, between which there have always been warm periods of varying length. Hence there has always been climatic change! There are two interpretations of the definition of a ice age: one group of researchers believes that an ice age only exists if at least one polar region in the continental area is covered by ice. Others speak of an ice age only when both poles are covered by ice. According to this interpretation, the current ice age began around 2.7 million years ago. According to today's interpretation, this would correspond to the Quaternary period.

With a duration of 300 million years, thePalaeoproterozoic ice age2.4 billion years ago was the longest.And the biorhythm of our satellite is supported by the current knowledgethat an alternation between ice ages and warm periods occurs every 100,000 years (16).

Fig.11: The different ice ages

There are studies that indicate that there was a global cold snap with a snowball Earth event in the Neoproterozoic - i.e. a glaciation (ice age) of the entire globe.

It is interesting to know that atthe beginning of the Palaeoproterozoic there wasa high concentration of methane in the atmosphere with only a low oxygen content. However, the oxygen produced by cyanobacteria through oxygenic photosynthesis was consumed again through the oxidation of organic compounds. And it was only when this epoch was over that oxygen was able to accumulate both in the atmosphere and in the oceans (17).

It amountedto as much as 30-35 percent. The oxygen in turn oxidized the methane in the atmosphere to CO2 and water. The drop in methane content as a strong greenhouse gas then led to a cooling of the climate, as a result of which temperatures remained at a low level for a very long time over 300 million years. The sun was also partly responsible for this process. At the time of thePaleoproterozoic, it had a much lower luminosity than today (85 percent less) and thus contributed to global glaciation. However, the problem of greenhouse gases persists. Today it is CO2 from modern industry, methane does not yet play a major role, but could become very relevant again in the near future as a result of the thawing of permafrost soils. Siberia is particularly threatened by this, with huge permafrost soils covering 65 percent of the land area. TheBagatai craterin Siberia is a current example of the ongoing thawing process with all its consequences for the lives of people in this region: the consequences can be seen immediately in Yakutsk: The stilts, which reach 20 meters deep, can no longer withstand the pressure of the houses built on them because the ground is thawing and becoming soft. One cause is man, who has robbed the forest floor of its natural protection by brutally cutting down the forests for timber, and moss and plant life alone were no longer sufficient as protective cover, fires ate into the depths and destroyed further protective layers. The sun could unfold its heat unhindered in the soil and the ground thawed. Methane and CO2 gases rise into the atmosphere and amplify the global temperaturerise.

During snowball ice age episodes, so-calledalbedo feedback(reflection of sunlight by the snow and ice cover of up to 90 %) can occur, which at that time led to a cooling of the earth to minus 50 degrees. It was only when volcanic eruptions with their CO2 emissions reached a limit that the climate warmed up again, leading to enormous changes with heavy rainfall and a rise in sea level of several hundred meters. According to science, temperatures are said to have reached up to 40 degrees.

It is interesting to note from polar ice studies that the CO2 concentration in the pre-industrial age was 50% lower than it is today. What was man doing there and why did nobody notice?

As early as 2008, a commission of the world's oldest geoscientific association, the Geological of London, propagated that theHolocene(interglacial period) was coming to an end and that this would be accompanied by climate change. The commission cited humans, man-made greenhouse gases from industry and agriculture, the transformation of landscapes and much more as the causes(18).

Other scientists describe the climatic changes as follows:

"During the present ice age, warm and cold phases alternate in a cycle of about 100,000 years. The Quaternary comprised more than 20 cold/warm cycles, although the amplitude of the earlier cycles was probably smaller than that of the later ones. The Holocene of the present was preceded by the Eemian about 130,000 to 116,000 years ago and the Holsteinian Warm Period about 230,000 years ago. Of the last warm periods, the climate of the last interglacial, the Eemian, is best documented by data and model studies. While the greenhouse gas concentrations in the Eemian were similar to those in the pre-industrial period, the Earth's orbital parameters differed significantly. The seasonal and latitudinal variations in insolation were greater in the Eemian and insolation was stronger in the high latitudes and weaker in the low latitudes compared to pre-industrial times. According to proxy data, temperatures in north-eastern Siberia near the Arctic coast were 10 °C higher than in the late Holocene around 128,000 years ago, and 8 °C higher on Greenland around 126,000 years ago. East Antarctica was also a few degrees warmer. Overall, based on data, the Eemian is estimated to be 1-2 °C warmer than the pre-industrial epoch. Model simulations, on the other hand, show slightly less warmer temperatures in the higher latitudes in the Eemian. The warm periods lasted between 10,000 and 30,000 years. In between were various cold periods such as the Weichselian, Saale and Elsterian (named according to the North German nomenclature). There was a particularly long warm period of around 30,000 years about 400,000 years ago. A similar duration has also been calculated for the current warm period under naturalCO2 conditions.If the current carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere remains the same for many thousands of years or even increases further, the next cold period could fail and the ice age that has lasted for 2.6 million years could be over. Humanity would then possibly haveushered inanew climate epoch, the'Anthropocene'."

"Milankovitch theory:Thefundamental cause of the relatively regular fluctuations between cold and warm periods in the Quaternary is seen in the variability of the Earth's orbital parameters. This explanation is also known as the Milankovitch theory after the pioneer of orbital propulsion research. It states that the Earth does not move evenly around the sun like clockwork, but instead exhibits quasi-regular deviations from it due to the gravitational pull of other planets, which follow different time scales and can be calculated in advance. Firstly, there is the deviation of the Earth's elliptical orbit from the circular orbit, the eccentricity, then the variation in the inclination of the Earth's axis to the Earth's orbital plane, the obliquity and finally the precession, a kind of pendulum motion of the Earth's axis. All in all, there are complicated overlaps and dependencies between the individual effects. The decisive factor here is how much solar radiation the continents of the northern hemisphere receive in summer: If it falls below a critical value, the snow from the previous winter no longer melts, new snow falls on top of it the next winter and an ice sheet gradually forms. Favorable conditions for warm summers in the northern hemisphere exist in the following cases: On its elliptical orbit, the earth is significantly closer to the sun in the northern summer than in the northern winter (eccentricity). The Earth's axis is relatively strongly inclined (obliquity), especially in northern summer towards the sun (precession). The next major reduction in solar radiation on the northern hemisphere in summer will begin in 30,000 years" (19).

But there are other not insignificant factors that influence our climate: Every 11 years, the sun's magnetic fieldh reverses polarity and, due to the high level of activity on the sun's surface, many plasma tubes can be seen on the sun's surface in combination with many sunspots. At the same time, it gets colder on Earth than it was in 1968, when the Rhine frozeover.

Fig. 12 and Fig. 13: 1968: The frozen Rhine

At the same time, the sun emits radionuclides, which trigger auroras whenhits the Earth's magnetic field. In 1989, such solar activity caused a power outage in Quebec, resulting in a short-term disaster. Such solar activity occurred in February 2023, resulting in auroralphenomena as far away as central Germany.

Fig. 14 and Fig. 15: Northern lights over Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania

in the night from 26. 02. 23 to 27. 02. 23

Of particular interest forclimatic developments on our planet are the shifts in the continental plates. When the North and South American plates moved towards each other and formed a land bridge 2.6 million years ago - Central America - the Gulf Stream was diverted northwards, transporting warm water into the North Atlantic. As the water evaporated, the moisture was transported to the European continent by the air current(s) and winds, resulting in a lot of rain, which flowed into the Arctic Ocean as fresh water and lowered the salinity of the water. This in turn meant faster freezing, the resulting ice surfaces reflected the sun's rays, the water itself could no longer store heat and the Earth cooled down (20). Like a chain reaction, the sea level is now falling because more and more water is being trapped in the ice and the sea level is falling. The result is a cold and dry climate. At the end of the ice age, the opposite development occurs: because the ice melts, the sea level rises again, a process that we are already observing on Earth. In the Antarctic, the ice mass has shrunk dramatically over the last 40 years. Today, research ships can already sail through ice-free zones in summer! Grasslands and forests are also subject to these climatic processes, as grasslands develop into forests again, with the inevitable consequence of a changed animal world. For mammoths, for example, this could have been a reason for their extinction(20).

And what are we doing today? We are still deliberately converting forests into farmland - what a devastating fact. The Arctic iceis already melting much faster than previouslycalculated by climate models.

Fig. 16: The melting of the Arctic ice; 1950-2050

Perhaps we should pay a little more attention to these natural processes after all.